1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to an object locating system to be used for robotic machinery and, more particularly, to a system which locates an object by determining a normal to the surface of the object and the intersection point of the normal with the surface.
2. Description of the Related Art
There is a need in robot applications to provide a system which will locate objects such as plates and locate holes in plates with a high degree of precision. For example, to put a bolt in a hole, it is necessary to locate the hole and approach the hole with the bolt from the proper direction with the bolt lined up along the axis of the hole. When the robot is to put the bolt in the hole, the first step is to locate the hole. Since robot vision systems generally require an extensive length of time to process a camera image, it is important that the equipment used to determine object location be simple and fast, so that overall system performance will be acceptable.